


Invariable

by MercuryMapleKey



Series: Angst Prompt [3]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Animated (2007)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 10:10:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1854178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryMapleKey/pseuds/MercuryMapleKey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've been following the same patterns and never calling it for what it's worth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invariable

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this off a tumblr challenge off the prompt "I'm not cut out for this". It's short. But it's also Wasp/Ironhide which the world just plain needs more of. Also I like it.

He never called it what it was. Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he didn’t care, maybe he just wasn’t quite sure himself, but Ironhide was.

               It didn’t really matter. He made sure it didn’t matter; so Wasp couldn’t even admit they were friends, it didn’t change a thing. Not the time they spend together or the way in which they occupied it. Not pulling pranks, and training up, and complaining about the world – that one was Wasp’s forte – and definitely not making out behind empty warehouses at the back of the camp. Wasp convinced himself it was nothing as studiously as he met all his other goals, with a lot of work and an attitude forced in nonchalance. He was good at what he did. Perhaps Ironhide should have had an issue with the way the mini actively pushed them apart more often than not, but he was still young and still ignorant and who was to say this wasn’t just the way things worked with Wasp?

               Besides, he knew it wasn’t a result of his own shortcomings; it was Wasp. Every time since the beginning of it all it was Wasp who would shove him back, insults frantically bubbling forth like bites, and it was Wasp who’d try to storm off only to double back frustrated swearing with servos pressed to his helm like there was something he couldn’t get out. It was Wasp who would choke out exasperated: “I’m just not cut out for this!”

               They never called him who he was. It had been a mistake, it was wrong, it never should have happened. He’d been framed, betrayed, left to rust; no one believed the word of a double agent and the weight of it made Wasp _burn_.

               It didn’t really matter. No one cared because no one had to. In the stockades one came to learn how little the outside world mattered, and how impossible it was to stop thinking about it regardless. The Autobots had built themselves a torture chamber, full of isolation, processor numbing monotony, and countless ruthless prison guards. Wasp lived it all, stripped of everything from his dreams to his dignity and left only with the fraying, frtizing code of a mind destroyed.

               The first few years were the hardest. Before he’s known just where he stood, when the hope had retained in clever optics resolute and unyielding in their belief that this accident would be exposed for what it was; he would get his justice. In a way those cycles had also been the easiest. Because even through the pain and the fear and the desperate attempts to stave off any show of weakness, he’d known: this wasn’t where he was meant to be. Alone in the corner of what had become his whole world Wasp would curl and he’d cry and he’d whisper to himself, “I’m not cut out for this.”

               He never found out what it was. It was a mistake, it was an accident, an experiment, he’d been genetically combined with some sort of organic insect. Ironhide never found out specifics until long after the event.

               It didn’t really matter. Not in light of the blackened results. Whatever had happened it had created a monster, an organic nightmare as morbid and otherworldly as any horror story had ever told. It wasn’t Wasp. It couldn’t be Wasp, but even as he denied it the similarities shone through, pieced and hacked reminders of an old friend who would never admit he was a friend peeking through the organic sludge and _flesh_ like something he had never wanted to see. It was the little things, the stripes, the colours, the tone of voice though it was warped and fragmented beyond comprehension that revealed who he’d once been. It was the unrelenting determination in which he pursued that which he was after, cold contempt twisted and warped into nothing but a wild rage.

               The monster, Waspinator, hadn’t recognized him; there wasn’t enough of Wasp left in there. Ironhide wasn’t sure if there was anything of him left at all. Not everyone felt the same, but they hadn’t known him like he had. He wasn’t cut out for this.


End file.
